The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Present information handling systems often take advantage of various data storage technologies, such as a redundant array of independent disks (RAID), which is a storage technology combining multiple disk or other drives into a logical storage unit. The use of RAID technology can improve data redundancy and performance. Data may be distributed across the drives in several ways, referred to as RAID levels. The RAID level utilized may depend on the specific level of redundancy and performance required. Each level provides a different balance between reliability, availability, performance, and capacity of the information handling system.
The endeavor for improved performance has led to the increased use of Flash based drives and other solid state devices. Yet, the characteristics of device wear for Flash based drives or other solid state systems (e.g., Flash memory has a relatively limited number of writes before wearing out) is changing the conventional assumptions of RAID levels generally made with respect to spinning disk drives. For example, smaller data allocations may generally be desirable for increasing or maximizing performance. On the other hand, large writes may be more desirable for decreasing or minimizing device wear with respect to solid state or Flash drives.
Some conventional caching technologies attempt to solve a portion of this problem by concatenating multiple writes together. However, there remains a need for further improvement in the performance and durability of information handling systems utilizing or incorporating Flash based or other solid state devices, or generally in the handling of I/O in all information handling systems.